(1) If you missed any of the blog entries here this week, you might have missed the hurriedly arranged radio interview I did on Tuesday. 000 miles a year; that’s 300 hours! Brian Tracy taught me early to turn my car into a mobile classroom. Listen to instructional CDs as you drive and each year is the equivalent of two semesters of an advanced degree. Combined with a reading routine, you can separate yourself from the herd of average, CD by CD, book by book!”

Though I sometimes listen to music, I must say that I have been using my driving time in this way since I started to drive in 1985. Back then, I listened to cassette tapes of the Bible and of Bible teaching, while averaging far more than 12,000 driving miles a year.

Education should never stop for any of us and implementing a plan for personal growth (spiritual, intellectual, etc.) while driving the car may seem a small step, but over time, it will reap great rewards.

(3) There’s a number of good resources available in this week’s Friday Ligonier $5 sale! Check it out here.

(1) If you are not adverse to extreme satire, you might enjoy this compromised Bible version.

(2) Dan Phillips provides a number of excellent axioms to live by, such as this one:

“If nobody else has ever seen what you’re seeing in the Bible, that’s probably because it isn’t there”.

…and this one:

“Preach like God’s watching, like you’ll never get another chance, and like every second of your hearers’ time is precious.” More here.

(3) Some notable quotes: “I can say from experience that 95% of knowing the will of God consists in being prepared to do it before you know what it is.” – Donald Gray Barnhouse

“Be assiduous in reading the holy Scriptures. This is the fountain whence all knowledge in divinity must be derived. Therefore let not this treasure lie by you neglected. Every man of common understanding who can read, may, if he please, become well acquainted with the Scriptures. And what an excellent attainment would this be!” – Jonathan Edwards

“Thus it comes about that we see men who in [God’s] absence normally remain firm and constant, but who, when he manifests his glory, are so shaken and struck dumb as to be laid low by the dread of death – are in fact overwhelmed by it and almost annihilated. As a consequence, we must infer that man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.” – Calvin, Institutes 1:1:3

“We need to make plain that total depravity is not just badness, but blindness to beauty and deadness to joy; and unconditional election means that the completeness of our joy in Jesus was planned for us before we ever existed; and that limited atonement is the assurance that indestructible joy in God is infallibly secured for us by the blood of the covenant; and irresistible grace is the commitment and power of God’s love to make sure we don’t hold on to suicidal pleasures, and to set us free by the sovereign power of superior delights; and that the perseverance of the saints is the almighty work of God to keep us, through all affliction and suffering, for an inheritance of pleasures at God’s right hand forever.” John Piper, The Legacy of Sovereign Joy: God’s Triumphant Grace in the Lives of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, p. 73.

(4) I remain very encouraged by the feedback I continue to receive regarding my new book Twelve What Abouts- Answering Common Objections Concerning God’s Sovereignty in Election. If you have no idea what I am talking about, perhaps you would like to click on one of the links on the right hand side of this page for more details. Its available in both eBook and paperback.

(5) Sadly, there’s nothing good in this week’s Friday Ligonier $5 sale. Of course, I’m joking! Check it out here.

(1) Some quotes worth pondering:

“God doesn’t need your good works; your neighbor does.” – Martin Luther

“Belief in evolution is a denial of the gospel. For if Adam’s sin did not bring about the groaning, decay and physical death for all of creation then neither does Christ’s physical death provide redemption for it. (Romans 8:21-23)” – monergism.com

“The Reformation leveled the playing field and revealed the janitor is as holy as the Pope.” – Jeff Rose

“There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.” – Jonathan Edwards

“The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood lurks, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.” – John Calvin, A Calvin Treasury. Christianity Today, v. 37, n. 4.

“We must learn where our personal weaknesses lie. Once they are identified, we must be ruthless in dealing with them. Earlier generations called this the “mortification of the flesh,” that is, pronouncing the death sentence upon sin and putting that sentence into daily effect by killing all that sets itself against God’s purpose in our lives.” – Alistair Begg, Made For His Pleasure, Moody Press, 1996, p. 33.

“Sin cannot dethrone God. That is what sin aims to do, but it misses its mark. Sin brings guilt to a man, but it does not bring him one ounce of sovereignty. God rules even when men imagine they are defying Him.” – Tom Wells

“Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.” – Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings, ed. by Charles Wallace Jr, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 109.

“Bring your beliefs to the test of the Scriptures, and you are likely to discover that it is much harder and more painful to unlearn some things than it is to learn new ones.” – A.W. Pink

(2) This week’s resources in the Friday Sale at Ligonier are worth checking into. Check out the $5 Ligonier sale here.

(1) I love theology, missions, preaching, worldviews, music, and more. Check out the $5 Ligonier sale here.

(3) Rock of Ages by Augustus Toplady (1740-1778)

Rock of Ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in Thee
Let the water and the blood,
From thy wounded side which flowed
Be of sin the double cure
Save from wrath and make me pure

Not the labors of my hands
Can fulfill Thy law’s demands
Could my zeal no respite know
Could my tears forever flow
These for sin could not atone
Thou must save, and Thou alone

Nothing in my hand I bring
Simply to Thy cross I cling
Naked, come to thee for dress
Helpless, look to thee for grace
Foul, I to the fountain fly
Wash me, Savior, or I die
Wash me, Savior, or I die
Wash me, Savior, or I die

While I draw this fleeting breath
When mine eyes shall close in death
When I rise to worlds unknown
And behold thee on Thy throne
Rock of Ages, cleft for me
Let me hide myself in Thee
Let me hide myself in thee
Let me hide myself in thee

(4) Punctuation Matters! (usually a whole lot more than spelling does)

(1) A Reminder – in case you were not aware (the blog has been down for 5 of the last 7 days): I was interviewed by Pastor Kevin Boling on the “Knowing the Truth” Broadcast about my book “Twelve What Abouts” (and the subject of Divine election) last week on a radio station covering all of South Carolina and parts of neighboring states. Dr. R. C. Sproul’s CD series The Promise Keeper: God of the Covenants is available in the Ligonier Friday $5 sale (normally $38). In this series, Dr. Sproul demonstrates that the one, true Promise Keeper always keeps His promises. He explains how God, throughout history, has fulfilled His promised plan of redemption in and through His people.

There are other very useful materials available today also. Check out the $5 Ligonier sale here.

(3) Talking about Divine election, Modern Reformation magazine interviewed Dr. J. I. Packer some time back. There was an interesting exchange on the subject:

MR: Dr. Packer, what exactly do people mean by unconditional election?

Packer: It is a phrase which folk use to express this thought: that because we sinners are helpless, God has to take all the steps that are necessary in order to bring us to faith and fellowship with himself and finally to eternal life. Unconditional election is the name for the choice God makes to do that in any particular case, and it has to be unconditional because if God waited for man to merit it, he would wait forever.

MR: Dr. Packer, why do we need an election?

Packer: Because we will never be saved unless God chooses to save us. Election leads to the saving action of God in his lordship, and if we were left to ourselves we would never respond to God on our own at all. This is what people don’t seem to appreciate, that all of us by nature are anti-God in our deepest instincts (see Romans chapter 3). We don’t always realize this because many of us think we are seeking God, and frankly, people want a God they can manage and manipulate and have as a safety net. Those are facts about human life, and very familiar facts. But when it is a matter of responding to the real God and responding in a way that he calls for –that is by humbling ourselves before him, learning to trust his word absolutely, turning from sin, taking our hands off of the reins of our own life and letting him be in control –we wake up to the fact that we don’t like this at all and we shy back from it. That is our nature. So you see, God has to take action otherwise we shall never come to him at all because that is the state in which fallen humans find themselves.

MR: Doesn’t this detract from our responsibility to respond to the gospel? If I’m one of the elect, God will save me, and if I’m not I cannot be saved anyway so why worry about it?

Packer: No, that isn’t the way to look at it because God has made us folk who act of their own will and he keeps us that way. And so he takes account of us for the things that we have done because they really were our own actions. The fact that we haven’t got it in us to respond to God in a positive way doesn’t mean that we don’t choose not to respond to God. We do choose not to respond to God, and it’s for that choice that we’re responsible before him. The truth about us is that we are like drowning folk who can’t swim and left to ourselves would just go under and eventually not come up again. God takes action, as it were, to dive in, swim to us, grab hold of us and save us. Election, as we said a moment ago, is his decision to do that, and in his lordship and power he does it, and so our salvation is entirely due to him. But all the time we are responsible for being the people that we are, drowning in our own moral mess.

MR: Isn’t foreknowledge the basis of election? Didn’t God choose us because he looked down into the future and foresaw that we would believe in him?

Packer: He foreknew us all right, but he foreknew us as we are by nature, that is, he foreknew us as folk who wouldn’t respond to him unless he first changed our heart, so he chose us to have our hearts changed. But it’s all his initiative, all his sovereignty first to last. The Bible describes this human condition in many ways. It tells us that we are spiritually blind, spiritually deaf, our hearts are hard–that is to say we are unresponsive to God, and we are spiritually dead. The Bible says all those things. You couldn’t express the thought of unresponsiveness more strongly.
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I would greatly value your prayers for Thursday morning.

I am scheduled to be interviewed for an hour, SC on a 50,000 watt station covering all of South Carolina and parts of North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.

The program will air live from 11:00am – 12 noon EST on Christian Talk 660AM and 92.9FM. Additionally, the program is broadcast live nationally via live webcast on Sermon Audio dot com. – www.KnowingTheTruth.org

as the crown was placed on Elizabeth’s head, she was told “wear this, till He comes, to whom it belongs.” The Queen’s crown is a borrowed crown.

He is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

… even so, come Lord Jesus.